How reckon with late Schubert? It inhabits a timeless musical precinct unto itself.
The pianist Claudio Claudio Arrau (in my book Conversations with Arrau) applied the term “Todesnähe” – a proximity to death. After Schubert (born in 1797) contracted syphilis in 1822 or 1823, his intimacy with death ripened. In 1824 he wrote: “I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who, in sheer despair over this, ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better.”
But there is more than that. Late in his short life (he died in 1828), Schubert’s characteristic morbidity turned uncanny. A late Schubert song like “Der Doppelganger” projects a Dostoyevskian derangement.
I long ago proposed to my friend the bass trombonist David Taylor that “Doppelganger” would suit his extreme virtuosity – which complements extreme states of feeling. He first performed “Doppelganger” at the Musikverein in Vienna. The response was fortifying.
More recently, Taylor and I have been reading Mahler songs. The result is a five-song cycle for bass trombone and piano that I call “Einsamkeit.” The songs are by Mahler and Schubert. They begin with a jilted lover. Each maps a more advanced state of existential solitude:
Mahler: Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht
Schubert: Die Stadt
Schubert: Der Doppelganger
Schubert: Die Nebensonnen
Schubert: Der Leiermann
I cajoled the Israeli-American choreographer Igal Perry to turn this 20-minute cycle (our tempos are very deliberate) into a dance piece. I have known and worked with Igal for more than a decade. I wanted him to dance the Leiermann — the final song of Schubert’s cycle Die Winterreise. And so he did – last weekend, with his Peridance Contemporary Dance Company.
Richard Capell, in his peerless Schubert’s Songs (1928), says of “Der Leiermann” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”): “A madman meets a beggar, links with him his fortune, and the two disappear into the snowy landscape . . . We may read anything or nothing much into the cleared scene.” Capell also writes that it is “the last turning of the wintry road – a chance encounter to which no purpose had led, but there, and so not refused by our poet and musician.”
Counter-intuitively, Igal’s Leiermann wore a white suit. But his gaunt, angular presence registered – instantly — a distressed gravitas. His impersonation was all depth; his disjunct gestures were minimal, almost incidental.
At the end of Schubert’s song, the singer addresses the Leiermann:
Strange old man,
shall I go with you?
Will you turn your hurdy-gurdy
to my songs?
For this naked summons I had Taylor unmute his horn. Perry’s Leiermann strayed upstage and mounted a staircase to a vacant window, in which he became a silhouette.
Johann Michael Vogl, the most eminent contemporary exponent of Schubert’s songs, wrote after Schubert died that his compositions were products “not of conscious action” but “of providence,” that they occupy “a state of clairvoyance or somnambulism.”
David Taylor and I next perform “Einsamkeit” – with subtitles, sans dancers – at the Brevard (N.C.) Music Festival on July 6.
memorable unique interpretation